


head underwater

by beanierose



Series: intention verse [3]
Category: RuPaul's Drag Race RPF
Genre: Dolly is a dog, M/M, Magical Realism, and we miss her terribly, playing fast and loose with the multiverse
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2020-09-15
Updated: 2020-10-06
Packaged: 2021-03-06 23:21:09
Rating: Explicit
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 4
Words: 17,969
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/26477122
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/beanierose/pseuds/beanierose
Summary: so you are a witch now, yes? (trixie & katya process the events ofVernalis)
Relationships: Trixie Mattel/Katya Zamolodchikova
Series: intention verse [3]
Series URL: https://archiveofourown.org/series/1761013
Comments: 59
Kudos: 76





	1. just your average tuesday night prestidigitation

**Author's Note:**

  * For [stutter](https://archiveofourown.org/users/stutter/gifts).
  * Inspired by [Vernalis](https://archiveofourown.org/works/23451748) by [stutter](https://archiveofourown.org/users/stutter/pseuds/stutter). 

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> some of you may remember that way back in february, for my birthday, [stutter](https://archiveofourown.org/users/stutter) wrote [vernalis](https://archiveofourown.org/works/23451748/chapters/56215783) and it was the best thing that ever happened to me in my life. well, now it's her birthday. this is what i wrote. baby, i love you completely.

_there’s a little bit of magic_  
_everybody has it_

* * *

“ _Fuck_ , Tracy. God.” Katya is breathing in open-mouthed, enormous, panicking gulps like a fish. The lines of her lipstick are blown out and fuzzy, and her chest is glistening, sweat-slick where it plunges into her little black negligee. “I’m so sorry.”

“Whoa, hey.” Trixie catches her panicked hands right out of the air and holds them against her own chest. “It’s okay. It’s, like. . . it’s not your fault. You didn’t do anything wrong.”

They’re crowded together in the tight, dark space just offstage. The host is introducing the next performer and the sound is wired so loud Trixie feels it into her teeth. They’re at Tiger Shark, the same venue where Trixie met _Katya_ for the first time. Her humiliation burned so brilliantly that night it should’ve left a scorched spot on the earth where nothing could grow, but they’ve been back here a bunch of times since. It’s not Trixie’s regular gig anymore; The Basement is their home turf now. Still, she felt a little flare of fondness when she sat down in front of the mirror, careful to pitch her weight towards the left side of the chair because the right legs are _busted_ , mama. Trixie knows the torsion-twist of the corridors backstage, knows to duck in against the wall like she’s Lara Croft if someone else is coming by.

“Tracy,” Katya says again, very quietly. She’s holding both hands out in front of herself, and tiny pink petals are bursting forth from her palms like confetti and littering the ground at their feet. “Do you think people saw?”

“Um, _yeah_ ,” Trixie scoffs.

It’d been mid-number. Trixie had been singing _Time After Time_ and Katya had been running ecstatic circles around the stage, gyrating on the floor, bicycle kicking with her crotch aimed directly at Trixie. It’s not how they close at _Hi!_ Their regular crowd of WeHo gays are loyal only so long as the show gives them an excuse to get too turnt on Tito’s-soda-splash-of-crans. They’re not trying to indulge any romantic notions from the two of them. Whenever they get the chance to guest at another venue, they allow themselves the small pleasure of ending their set with that whole schtick. It always makes an audience ignite like flash paper to see a display of unbridled tenderness from the drag scene’s golden couple.

Katya had flipped over into a handstand, wiggling her legs in the air like a frog while Trixie did her best to sing a live fade out, like, gracefully. When Katya’d righted herself again with a noise like a Groan Tube and lifted her hands over her head, a shower of petals had cascaded down and gotten tangled in the strands of her wig, glued to her sweaty skin, caught in the hexagons of her fishnets. The audience had gone wild, beating the walls, screaming themselves hoarse for her. Trixie is so proud to stand up on that stage beside Katya that it makes her phosphorescent. Her voice never even cracked, and Katya had had the sense to turn her stricken face away from the audience, keep it only for Trixie.

“I think you’re good, mama,” Trixie tells her. “I think, like, it’s just your average Tuesday night prestidigitation, you know what I mean? Ain’t nobody trying to burn you at the stake, girl.”

The audience has seen wilder things at this venue. They’ve seen wilder things from _them_ , probably. Katya walks out onto any stage like everybody in the audience has loved her for her whole life, and then she just does whatever rubberband bullshit feels good to her in the moment and they lap it out of her cupped hands like they’re parched.

“Right. Yeah. You’re right, probably.” Katya makes an O shape with her mouth and circles the tip of her index finger around, cleaning up the edges of her lipstick. The petals have stopped with a few last impotent spurts, and her hand, when she slides it into Trixie’s, is trembling. “I want to go home now. Can we go home?”

“Can I de-drag?” Trixie shrills, and then realises they’re still standing right offstage and not respecting their fellow performer’s space or craft. She leads Katya down the hall and into the dressing room, deposits her like a small child into a chair at the vanity.

Trixie gets to work immediately, popping her lashes off and securing them away in the little case Katya makes fun of her for having. Her wig isn’t glued down and she eases it off next, scrubs a hand over his bald head. It’s awful, swampy, and he wipes his glistening hand off on his own thigh. Next to him, at the other mirror, Katya is moving slowly, like she’s afraid of what her hands might do next.

The person looking back at Trixie in the mirror isn’t reading _woman_ anymore. They never have, not really, but since what happened Trixie feels like a charlatan trying to pass himself off as female. Every time he paints, or puts on a wig, or straps on his ten-pound tits, he thinks about her. The soft curve of her breasts and stomach and thighs, the long blonde braids growing right out of her scalp, her pretty brown eyes. Beatrice. It feels grotesque to present himself to the world as Trixie, now.

This is always the part he likes the least, bald and lashless serving full cryptid realness. Katya, still in face but dewigged and out of her padding, occupies that liminal space with such ease. Trixie feels vulgar as a Schiele sketch next to her. She catches him looking and leans in for a fast kiss, now that it doesn’t matter if their lipstick gets smudged. He captures her by the ears and holds her there, takes his time even though his fingers are struggling for purchase against her slick skin. He feels want through padding and corset and three pairs of tights.

When Trixie unscrews the lid of the Albolene tub a shower of sparks erupts from it like it’s spring-loaded. He doesn’t yelp, already desensitised. Since they’ve been back they’ve navigated a thousand small catastrophes. They’re alone in the dressing room, but he’s gotten used to shielding what he’s doing with his body, angling his broad shoulders so nobody can see whatever act of necromancy Katya’s accidentally conjured this time.

“Oh, Jesus fucking Christ,” Katya mutters next to him, “I’m sorry, honey.” She’s done already, back in black jeans and an old t-shirt from the yoga studio, a baseball cap rammed onto her head. She’s still in face, still wearing her fucking lashes, which, like, he doesn’t profess to understand a lot of what Katya does, but that’s psycho behaviour. Trixie scoops his index and middle fingers into the product, pressed together, and Katya wheezes and thunders her feet against the floor. “Okay, okay, oh my God. I got it. You fucked a _girl_ , you butch fuckin’ monster.”

Trixie shrieks as loud as he dares — theatre school drilled into him a deference for the stage that’s hard to let go of — and punts the lid at Katya, who catches it out of the air without even looking. “I did not fuck a girl!” He waits a beat, lets his sharp tone hang in the air and carve out a space for his punchline. “She fucked _me_. And she was hardly my first.”

Katya crows and shakes her head like she’s tossing her hair over her shoulder and it’s so like her, so like the other Katya, that Trixie feels gooseflesh erupt along the length of his spine. She goes outside for a cigarette or four while he scrubs the last of Trixie off of himself, careful to collect the gritty scrim of her from around the edges of his face. When he’s done he goes out to find Katya, his drag bag slung over his shoulder and phone clutched in his hand with Uber already pulled up.

“You took my lid, you fiend,” he tells her, and holds out the Albolene tub for Katya to screw it closed again. She’s got her face angled away from him to exhale the last drags of her cigarette so it takes her a couple tries to get it fastened, and when she’s done she takes it from him and tucks it into her own bag, open at her feet. Trixie says, “Are you okay to go?”

Katya turns her delighted, wide-open face towards him. She’s already fumbling in the pocket of her jeans for a stick of gum, the ember of her cigarette a warm red glow on the ground between them. Trixie takes the stick she offers him and they stand shoulder to shoulder at the mouth of the alley while they wait for their car. He feels a bolt of chivalry whenever she’s in face and he isn’t, and he insists on opening the door of the Uber for her. She gives him the vertiginous slant of her mouth, says, “You looking to _make an arrangement_ , honey?” and he shoves her the rest of the way into the car.

She’s handsy, the adrenaline making her wide-eyed and teetering right on the edge of hysterical. Their driver’s eyes keep flicking up to the rear view to check on them. Trixie hems Katya into the corner of the Uber like a cat in a cartoon, all of her hair standing on end. She’s mouthing sloppily at his jaw, getting her lipstick all over him, and his skin prickles with her mint breath. Since they’ve been back, Trixie has gotten really good at sensing when Katya is about to lose her handle on things. He feels the shift in barometric pressure the way he used to back in Wisconsin, when the air would change before a storm so that he couldn’t seem to take a full, deep breath.

“Hey, stop. _Brian_.” He rests a warm, heavy, deliberate at her thigh, and she blinks at him. “Hey. Wait till we’re home, huh? I’m not looking to invite anyone into our marital bed.” He inclines his head towards their driver.

“It’s not a marital bed,” she tells him. “You haven’t made an honest woman of me yet, Tallulah.” When she holds her hand up between their faces to show him her bare ring finger, a little spurt of flame shoots from the tip. Her eyes get very wide and she folds her hands chastely into her lap.

Trixie touches his own fingers to his eyebrows to make sure they’re still there. They feel stiff with the remnants of Elmer’s glue, his face moulded and plasticky like a Ken doll. Or, well, he isn’t fooling anybody. He’s Barbara, honey. He says, “Did you- do you _want_ a ring? Is that like. . . we can do that, if you want.”

“No.” Katya scrunches her nose and a little more of her raw pink skin shows through her makeup. “I don’t want a ring. You know what the fuckin’ amateur dyke sleuths on Twitter would do with that? I’m not trying to fill our mentions with zoomed-in screenshots of our hands captioned like _Go off, married Moms????_ No.”

Trixie grunts a little noise of agreement and rests his head against the back of the seat. He’s exhausted. He’s exhausted all the time, because beauty is pain, drag is _pain_ , and it ain’t getting any easier the closer he gets to thirty. And now he wakes up in the middle of the night, his heart a fist in his throat, certain that Katya has opened a window and flown right out into the dark. She’s always there with him, sometimes asleep and sometimes blinking back at him, sometimes just a burning ember weaving around on the balcony.

Katya taps his cheek twice and he opens his eyes again. She’s peering at him, her eyes mostly lost beneath her lashes and the remnants of her makeup. “I like what she had. That little tattoo on her finger. I could do that.”

“No you couldn’t,” Trixie snorts. “You’re a huge baby when you get a tattoo. You think you can handle it on your finger? Isn’t that like the most painful place?”

“I’m a witch now,” Katya says cheerfully. “I’ll make some kinda poultice and I won’t even feel it.”

Trixie darts a panicked glance at their driver again but he’s being very careful to ignore them. On the scale of bizarre things Katya has done since getting into the car, saying that she’s a witch definitely falls below having a full face of makeup on or shooting flames from her fingertips. She settles for the rest of the car ride and by the time they pull up in front of their building she’s snoozing open-mouthed against his shoulder. Trixie shakes her gently and she snaps awake, blinks at him a couple times.

“We’re home, girl. Come on.”

Getting home from a gig is Trixie’s favourite part of the day. He pads around the condo turning on lamps, saying a self-conscious hello to Katya’s many tchotchkes and doing his best to ignore their curious gazes. Every single thing she tries to bring into their house is covered in either eyeballs or teeth, but she also lets him keep an entire closet for his doll collection and the walls in the drag room are painted Pepto-Bismol pink. They’re learning to compromise, together.

Trixie showers in the guest bathroom instead of waiting for Katya to be done in theirs, because she takes so much longer than he does and because he feels gross and he just wants to be horizontal. He wriggles into a clean pair of briefs, chest beaded with droplets like condensation on a windowpane, and flattens himself out in the middle of their bed. Twice, while he’s ordering food for them, he drops his phone onto his face.

“What’d you get?” Katya asks when he comes out of the bathroom, towel knotted at his hips. His skin is always so red after a shower and it makes Trixie want to touch, makes his fingers flex and his dick twitch.

He says, “Burger Bitch,” and Katya cracks open around a grin and gets onto the bed on his knees. Trixie reaches for him immediately and draws him down into a kiss, now that both of their faces are clean. He’s gotten used to the dish soap scent of Katya’s bare skin and he hums a contented noise into his mouth, mostly because he knows how bananas it still makes him. Their kiss is lazy, directionless, because Trixie is too hungry and tired to get to the evening’s main event right now.

“Okay, wait, honey,” Katya pulls back from him to say. “Okay. I wanna try something. Would you roll over?”

Trixie screams the kind of laugh that sends all the birds in a five mile radius caterwauling into the sky, the kind of laugh that leaves an eerie silence in its wake, and says, “You wanna _try something_? I think we’ve tried it before, girl.”

Katya’s stupid earnest face, hovering over him, gets pink, and he swats at Trixie’s bare arm. “No! Not- oh my _God_ , Tracy, you are loathsome. Not that. Shut up. Turn over.”

He does as he’s told, rolling onto his stomach and letting his face get mashed against the pillows. The noises of Katya’s fidgeting fill their bedroom, and when he comes back and straddles Trixie’s thighs he’s wearing underwear and, Trixie’s pretty sure, a t-shirt as well. As soon as Katya starts touching him, Trixie groans wildly. It’s been a long time since Katya’s taught a yoga class, but he flips over into earnest, namaste-mode as easily as if he were trying on an old, beloved sweater.

“Try not to arch into it like that, honey. Just relax. There you go. How’s that?”

Katya finds the right spot as easily as if he were in his own body, knuckling either side of Trixie’s spine and it’s so good, that instant relief, that he could cry. Instead, he just says, “ _Oh_.”

“That feels good?” Katya asks, totally devoid of smugness. God, if Trixie could do this to people he'd take out billboards, he’d hire skywriters.

He grunts. “You know it does, you fucking bitch. Press harder, I can take it.”

“I don’t think I _can_ press harder,” Katya says, a strange note in his voice, a wrong chord that makes Trixie try to lift up and turn to look at him. He can’t, his body too loose, too hungry for the twin spots of pressure right at his waist. Katya says quietly, “I’m not touching you, honey.”

It takes a beat for that to penetrate his brain-fog and make any sense at all. When it does, he says, “You’re not? I- _how_?”

“I don’t know,” Katya says. “I’m just. . . intention, I guess?”

“Oh my God! Katya!” Trixie does manage to roll over this time and he sits up, fists both hands in Katya’s t-shirt at the neck like he’s going to rattle him. He could, he _might_. “Have you been practicing?”

Katya’s face gets impish and he lifts one noncommittal shoulder, says, “I’m practicing now.”

Trixie hauls Katya up by the shirt and crushes their mouths together, kisses him until their teeth clash. He says, “God, you’re so stupid. I love you so much.”

Katya inflates with pleasure and kisses Trixie again, licking into his mouth and groaning, running his hands over the planes of Trixie’s chest. They’re interrupted by the buzzer and Trixie goes to answer the door to their dinner. He’s still only in his briefs and he’s half-hard but whatever, Mary. He’s answered the door in less acceptable garb than this a hundred times. Brian is asleep on his face in the middle of their bed when Trixie goes to find him. He’s exhausted by things that came easy to Katya, things she hardly seemed to even notice she was doing.

“Hey, hi,” Trixie says gently. Brian makes a garbled noise back at him and he huffs a little laugh. “You fell asleep again. You a narcoleptic now, mama?”

“I don’t fuck dead people.”

“No?” Trixie chomps on the inside of his cheek. “I do.” It makes Brian’s face explode into outrage, pink indignation blooming up the column of his throat. Trixie says, “You coming to eat?”

They’ve blocked this scene a hundred times and Trixie hits his mark, says _no I don’t want to eat in the bed, no, I don’t want you to eat in the bed without me_. Katya allows himself to be dragged out to the living room and deposited onto the couch. They eat quickly, in easy silence, too fatigued to make it into a production. Katya’s got his feet tucked beneath Trixie’s bare thigh and Trixie eats one-handed, the other wrapped around his bony ankle. Katya’s head keeps nodding forward over his burger and then he startles himself awake again, confused and sweet and grouchy.

“Hey,” Trixie says when he’s tossed their wrappers into the garbage, wiped down the countertops, set the diffuser to run a lemon-verbena medley that leaves the whole house smelling fresh and clean. Katya’s sitting up against the headboard with the iPad balanced against the slope of his thighs. When he sees Trixie he takes off his glasses and dumps everything onto the nightstand, reaches for him with grabby hands. Trixie slings a thigh across Katya’s knees and sinks down to straddle him. He accepts a kiss, pulls back to ask, “What else can you do with your mind?”

“You wanna help me find out?” Katya’s voice is dark, middle of the night quiet. His face gets very serious and his hands settle at the outsides of Trixie’s thighs.

Trixie hums and closes his eyes, tries to let his mind become uncluttered. He’s never been great at this. He went to yoga because he had a crush on the cute boy that taught the class, not because it was, like, _so_ revelatory or whatever the middle-aged Paltrow types claimed over their Blue Majik Lychee Boba Coolers. Katya’s muttering to himself, something that could be an incantation or just his regular formless monologue. Trixie feels a stirring low in his stomach, a tightness in his hip flexors, but that’s probably because Katya’s legs are warm between his and coarse with fine blond hair.

It doesn’t feel like he’s being touched, exactly. Earlier, it never even occurred to Trixie that Katya wasn’t working his knuckles into the meat of his back, but he knows what’s happening this time. He isn’t stupid with relief now; he can’t help but search for the ways it doesn’t feel the same. It’s almost like when they’re in drag, stealing a clandestine moment together in the back of a car or the tight space just offstage, and Katya gropes Trixie’s fake tits like it feels amazing.

He’s so hungry for it, even now that they have a handful of years behind them. The first suggestion of Katya’s touch always makes him nuts, makes his brain balloon. He’s going to marry him, he will, but he still gets a little shy whenever he’s the subject of Katya’s intense focus like this.

Katya touches the pad of his thumb to the space between Trixie’s brows and kneads a little, says, “You’re so _cute_ , Tracy. What am I gonna do with you?”

“I can think of some things.”

“With, or to?” Katya tilts his head and regards him lazily. He’s gotten more gaunt since they’ve been back, because he’s so preoccupied and so exhausted. Trixie makes sure they have breakfast and dinner together every day because he knows Katya will just forget to eat if Trixie doesn’t feed him, but it still isn’t enough to keep his cheeks as full as they had been.

Trixie says, “Yes,” and his hips stutter forwards.

It’s so familiar with Katya that he can’t distinguish whether he really does feel warm, confident fingers around his dick, or he’s just conjuring the memory. He knows what it’s like, the slide of Katya’s hand over slick skin, his small, awed breaths right in Trixie’s ear. When he rubs his thumb over the head of Trixie’s cock and it’s so fond, so affectionate that Trixie almost blacks out. All of that is missing, but he does feel something. It’s so peculiar to be certain that Katya’s touching him and then look down to see his dick straining, leaking a wet patch into the front of his briefs.

“Is it working?” Katya says after a little while.

When Trixie opens his eyes, Katya’s face is so earnest that he can’t help but capture him into a kiss. Katya’s licking into his mouth right away and groaning like he’s inside Trixie. Trixie pulls back to say, “It’s- I miss you touching me. I want you to touch me.”

“God, yes. I can do that.”

Katya shoves his hand inside of Trixie’s underwear immediately. There’s not a lot of room to manoeuvre, his wrist pinned by the elastic, but he gets his clever fingers around Trixie’s dick and strokes him just how Trixie likes it.

“Hey,” Trixie gets out, and then has to take a steadying breath. “This is like. . . it’s still good for you, right?”

Katya covers Trixie’s hand in his and presses it to his hard cock straining in his sweatpants. His head thunks back against the wall behind the bed and he groans, says, “I’m jumping in your hand, honey.” Trixie squeezes and Katya’s breath stutters out of him. He says, “Why wouldn’t it be good? You’re _so_ good. You’re so sexy I wanna murder you. I have wet dreams about fucking your Appalachian ass and then chasing you down a hallway with an ax.”

A small flare of indignation sparks in Trixie’s stomach but it’s out again just that quickly. “But you. . .” His face feels pinched with humiliation and he swallows roughly. “You’re a witch now, Katya.”

“I am,” Katya says cheerfully. “And I still want you more than anything. You’re more exciting than any of the magic.”

Trixie snorts and Katya rewards him with a little twist of his hand around Trixie’s dick. His breathing is coming more quickly now and he ducks his chin. Katya gets frustrated with the way his hand is trussed by Trixie’s briefs and he fumbles to get his dick out. He makes the same pleased little noise every single time he sees it and Trixie curls his toes, says, “That can’t be true.”

This morning, Katya set his mug of coffee on the counter to stir itself while he made out with Trixie and waited for the toaster oven to get done. He doesn’t carry a lighter for his cigarettes anymore, and they threw out all of their Band-Aids because Katya can heal their blisters and messed-up cuticles instantly now. He’s getting stronger every day, discovering more and more ways he can use his magic.

“Okay, fine, it’s not.” Katya screams a thrilled little one-two punch of laughter. He’s looking down at the work of his hands, at Trixie’s dick. “But I’d choose you over any of it. I’m gonna keep choosing you, honey.”

He lifts his chin to capture Trixie into a kiss then. It takes a couple more tugs on his cock and then he spills all over Katya’s knuckles and stomach with a low groan. His vision spangles like looking at the sun and he loses feeling in his hands and feet, loses his hearing. Katya is still holding onto him, one hand working him through it and the other clutching his hip. When he can finally see again, Katya is smiling serenely up at him.

“Sorry,” he says, and Trixie honks a laugh and swoops down to kiss him.

He makes Katya clean himself off with the pack of wipes from the nightstand because he knows he’ll be asleep again by the time Trixie comes back from the bathroom. He kisses Katya again, as sweetly as he can manage, and brushes his thumb over the shadow of Katya’s dick in his sweatpants, inclines his head in question. Katya shakes his head and squirms down against the pillows, wriggling like a grub.

“Okay, girl,” Trixie laughs. Katya gives a perfunctory tug on their sheets and then gives up and pouts at Trixie until he tucks him in. He kisses the top of his stupid bald head, says, “I knew you were entering the twilight of your life but mama, this is some geriatric realness.” Katya’s already most of the way asleep when Trixie pulls back and he says gently, “Goodnight, Brian.”

When Trixie squeezes the toothpaste tube, tiny white flowers come tumbling out into the sink. He sighs, dumps the whole thing in the trash, opens a fresh tube from the stockpile in the cabinet.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> i'm on [twitter](https://twitter.com/reallybeanie) and [tumblr](https://katiehoughton.tumblr.com/) if you want to chat. i'd love to know what you thought about this one! and don't forget to [wish stutter a happy birthday](https://stutter8.tumblr.com/ask) ♡


	2. like it never happened

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> thank you all for your sweet and supportive response to the first chapter! i'm so glad it's been well-received so far. [stutter](https://archiveofourown.org/users/stutter), my darling, you bring out the best in me. you _are_ the best of me. thank you, i love you.

Everything about their life now is so bizarre that having an ordinary morning feels like make-believe, like he’s crammed himself into a house he’s way too big for to play at domesticity and his arms and legs are bursting out of the windows and doors. Trixie has the apartment to himself today. He’s not booked, and he’s pottering, inventing chores to fill the hours until Katya comes back from another of his excursions. Trixie doesn’t know where he goes. They haven’t ever talked about it, and Trixie is nervous to probe him. Sometimes he wakes up in the morning and the bed is cold beside him and Katya is gone. There’ll always be a note, usually neatly printed on a pink Post-it and stuck to their bathroom mirror. _Gone to hunt goblins_ , it will say, or _I’m spending today with my secret second wife_ , or _I’m being experimented on for science, they want to clone the world’s chunkiest ass_. Trixie has all of them in his nightstand drawer, stacked in a little pile. They’re sweet, each one signed _Katya_ with a little heart. And he’s keeping count. He doesn’t get that same swooping, sick feeling in the pit of his stomach anymore when Katya has a secret. He doesn’t lie to him because Trixie doesn’t put him in a position where he has to. He’ll tell him when he’s ready.

Since they’ve lived together Trixie has been in charge of their laundry, because mama, who else? Katya rotates through the same three shirts as a boy and seems perfectly content to let them stew until they glow green in the night and could be cracked right in half. She doesn’t wash her drag stuff either, so Trixie does it because he’s doing his own anyway and because he’s the one who has to sit next to her in the back of an Uber or have her stand so close to him on a stage it’s like she’s trying to fit inside his skin. He’s set aside an entire day to do more than his typical, perfunctory skim of their most-worn items from the top of the pile, and he finds it right at the bottom of the basket.

Katya’s dress. The off-the-rack black jersey number she used to reach for over and over because it was comfortable. Not discarded at the bottom of their laundry pile. _Buried_. Trixie sits heavily on the end of their bed and spreads the dress out over his thighs. He pulls memories out of the pockets like tissues, folded small and worn soft as silk. The two witches looming over him, Beatrice’s warm soft body in the bed next to his. How it felt waking up to Brian in face and Katya, delighted as a sparrow, hopping around. How he’d blinked to clear his double vision over and over before his brain had adjusted. Beatrice’s quiet, teasing little breath of laughter puffing against his cheek.

He isn’t sure exactly how long he sits there. The world has tilted off of its axis and landed sideways with a thunk he felt through the middle of him. Eventually, the front door opens. Eventually Katya warbles a strange shrill that might be a greeting. Trixie doesn’t call back to him, can’t seem to open his mouth. The dress is still across his thighs and every time he brushes his fingers across it, it releases an herby smell he can’t pinpoint.

“Hey, honey, do you know if- _oh_.” Katya stops in the doorway and his Adam’s apple ducks shyly in his throat. “Hi. Um. What are you doing?”

“Laundry,” Trixie says too sharply. He sucks in a careful breath, says more gently, “Do you know about laundry?”

Katya laughs and comes over to stand next to him, angled so Trixie becomes ensnared in the triangle trap of his body. He says, “I do know about it. I prefer to be, like, an innocent bystander. I’m not trying to be an active participant.”

“Right,” Trixie says flatly.

The balcony door is open like always, so Katya can duck out for a cigarette without having to fight the tricky mechanism to unlatch it. In a few years, Trixie would like to have a house in a quiet neighbourhood, a backyard, maybe a pool of their own. He likes the thought of spending their off days stretched out on a sun lounger or splashing and trying to dunk each other. Today there’s some kind of party happening down the block, the kind that sounds like it’s gearing up to last well into the small hours of the morning. Trixie is suddenly exhausted and he lets his head roll forwards on his shoulders.

“Honey, what, uh. . . are you okay? What’s going on?”

“Why’d you bury this one? I was right there with you, Brian. It’s not- we don’t have any secrets.”

Katya sits down next to Trixie on the end of the bed and takes the dress gently out of his hands. He gathers it up and holds it to his chest, ducks his chin to breathe in the scent of it. It smells like her, like Katya, like their house, like the herbs she and Brian had picked fresh from the garden. A few of Dolly’s dark hairs are still clinging to it. Trixie chokes back something close to a sob.

“I didn’t want you to wash it. It’d be like it never happened.”

Trixie makes a hollow, indiscriminate noise. “I had to throw out two more palettes this morning because they were growing vines out of them, girl. We don’t need to keep this dress. But if you wanna, like, seal it up in an evidence bag then that’s your business.”

“Tracy, are you mad at me?”

“No,” Trixie lies. He tempers his voice, lets his body pitch sideways until he’s leaning against Katya’s shoulder. “I just miss her.”

“Beatrice?”

Her name makes grief well up inside and Trixie closes his eyes to it. “Yeah. I wish I could ask her, like, how to handle this.”

“How to _handle me_?”

Katya sounds affronted, but when Trixie looks at him he’s grinning and he darts a suggestive glance down at his own crotch. Trixie rolls his eyes, says, “How to help you. I’m not trying to make this harder- don’t!” He holds up a hand, shows Katya the flat of his palm.

“You don’t make it harder. You’re not. But I understand, honey. I get it. There’s so much I wish I could ask her.”

“You don’t get it!” He knows he’s being unfair. He’s not the one who came back irrevocably changed, he’s not the one trying to figure out how to control his _actual magic powers_. Still, he finds himself ducking away, cowering, trying to shield the raw spot from the world. “It’s not the same for you. I had to leave her behind.”

“I left her too. I left Katya.”

Trixie splutters something that might be indignant if he weren’t right on the edge of tears, unpleasant pressure already building behind his eyes and in his nose. “No you didn’t. You _are her_. She came back with us because she was always here.” He blinks hard, and a couple of hot tears escape to flee down his face. “I’ve never. . . I only had her for a day.”

Katya doesn’t lie to him anymore. He doesn’t say that Beatrice is a part of him. Instead, he wraps his arm around Trixie’s shoulders and traps him there, kisses the top of his head. They sit together on the end of their bed, Katya’s dress spread out across both their thighs, until Trixie gets a fucking grip. He is really, really trying. He’s being patient and honest and understanding, and it doesn’t come naturally to him. Not even with Brian. It’s work not to be snippish when he has to throw out another ruined wig, the hair matted with foliage and flowers. It’s work, not to let on how panicked he is when Katya almost blows their cover over and over again, when she conjures things right in front of their friends like it’s a fun party trick and not something that could’ve gotten her burned at the stake a few centuries ago. And yes, thank you, he’s aware of the irony. He knows there are places where the real danger is walking down the street hand in hand, kissing in the daylight.

“I’m so scared, all the time,” he says eventually. Katya is quiet, giving him space to talk. Making him fill the silence. “I’m scared that something’s going to happen to you. I’m scared that you’ll. . . that you’re gonna find people like you, people who can keep up.”

Katya slides right off the end of the bed and kneels at Trixie’s feet so he can peer up into his face instead. “Trixie. We went through a pretty significant experience together, mama. It wasn’t just me. I woke up, sure. _Ya prosnulsya_. But you changed, too. And what was my first instinct? What’d I ask you, right as soon as we were back?”

“To marry you,” Trixie says, thoroughly chastened.

“Uh-huh.” Katya’s got both hands at Trixie’s knees now, his fingers digging into the meat of his leg. “The only thing I could think about was capturing you forever, making it legally binding. I’m not going anywhere, honey.”

“Forever is a bold claim from you, girl. You’ve got, what, five more good years in you?”

Katya grins broadly and wriggles his shoulders. “You know all about what I’ve had in me, huh? God, you are so sexy. Can we be done fighting now? I wanna make out.”

He’s pouting up at Trixie and it shouldn’t be charming, shouldn’t be hot, but it _is_. Trixie follows Katya down to the ground and thrusts sloppily against him, kissing him deep and slow. Katya moans and clutches Trixie’s shoulder, says, “Really, baby? On the floor?”

“Shut up,” Trixie says, and rocks his hips sharply down. Katya is so hard against his thigh already and he’s making these soft, desperate noises into Trixie’s ear. “Just shut the fuck up, okay. Get your dick out.”

Brian’s eyes are blown out, swallowed by his pupils, and he hurries out of his shorts and underwear, pulls his t-shirt off over his head as well. His dick is red and dripping and Trixie groans, leans down to get his mouth around it. He hears a thunk and a strangled noise and glances up to see Brian wincing, rubbing the back of his head. He’s still kinda mad, and it makes him stupid. He swallows Brian down roughly and immediately chokes, has to pull off of him to swipe at his streaming eyes. Brian’s chuckling, looking down at Trixie across the length of his stomach, and he says, “Get _your_ dick out. I miss her.”

Trixie does, and he allows himself to be dragged back up so Brian can kiss him. He has his fist around both their cocks and he’s jerking them together while he licks into Trixie’s mouth. “Oh, Trixie, Trixie, I’m-” he says, and is interrupted by the familiar sound of every cabinet door in the entire house flinging open at once and all of their items tumbling out onto the floor.

He’s laughing as he comes, still laughing as he continues to jerk their dicks together until Trixie comes too with a low groan. He drops his head, hides his face against Brian’s shoulder, and he mutters, “I am not putting any of that away.”

“No, of course not,” Brian agrees. He’s still working them both, his dick sliding against Trixie’s in his slick fist. Trixie can’t imagine Beatrice letting this happen, letting herself get thoroughly distracted by Katya like this. She’s braver than he is.

Trixie goes to take a shower and he stands for a long time under the stream of the water, listening to Brian tidying away their things, watching his shame circling the drain, aching with how badly he misses Beatrice.

* * *

There had been no note this morning. Trixie had an early gig, had to be in drag by eight in the morning, but the apartment had already felt cold and deserted when he got up. Katya’s absence is a spectre that follows him around as he brushes his teeth, puts on a wig, tries not to look at his reflection too much. Every time he sees the Trixie mug it feels like he loses a little more of Beatrice. She has his face, but he hardly remembers what she looks like.

It had been a press thing, over before most people in Los Angeles had even emerged for the day, and Trixie is clean and shiny in his boy clothes before noon. He feels awkward existing in the space between his two engagements today, and he busies himself cleaning out the bathroom cabinets. Since he’s loved Brian he’s been better at being still, but when he’s alone he’s awful at it. Once he’s finished and he’s run a whole bag of expired and empty products down to the trash room, Trixie settles at the kitchen island with his laptop. He means to get some work done — he’s been battling with a song for weeks now — but instead he finds himself pulling up all of the sites he has bookmarked. Time runs away from him; he left his phone in the other room so he wouldn’t do something stupid like go live on Instagram, and so he misses multiple texts from Bob and snaps back into the present with the noise of it ringing.

“Girl, come on, you invited _me_ over.” Bob says without saying hello first. “Stop fucking your girlfriend for two seconds and let me in.”

“Oh, my God,” Trixie wails. “I’m _sorry_. She’s not even here. I’m not fucking anybody, I was waiting for you. I’ll buzz you up.”

Bob begins snooping immediately, while Trixie is buried half inside the refrigerator looking for the good seltzer. He straightens up, a cherry lime in one fist and an apple cranberry in the other, and shows them both to Bob to let him choose. He’s made himself comfortable on the barstool at the island and he’s studying the screen of Trixie’s laptop, doesn’t lift his eyes from it when he says, “Hey, you trying to find your real dad again?”

Trixie punts the seltzer can right at Bob’s head and grumbles when he snatches it out of the air without even looking. He comes around to sit on the stool next to him and look at the screen over Bob’s shoulder. “No, girl. I was just reminiscing, you know? Just looking at some of your old selfies.”

“You’re a cunt,” Bob says cheerfully. “What are you doing, though?”

Trixie chews on the inside of his cheek. He still sometimes gets a little shy around Bob when it comes to Katya, to the life they’re building. Bob doesn’t even know that they’re getting married, but Trixie still sometimes has his voice echoing around inside his head, hollering _a husband twin??_ He pauses long enough that Bob turns to look at him and he shrugs, rescues the strap of his tank top from slipping the rest of the way down his shoulder.

“We’re thinking about getting a dog.”

“You two?” Bob scoffs. “You’re going to voluntarily bring a creature into the home and try to keep it alive?”

He’s still scrolling aimlessly around the page, row after row of huge, beseeching canine eyes staring back at them both. Trixie and Katya have a few adoption listings bookmarked, but Katya has some kind of internal radar that seeks out the ugliest creature on every single site and Trixie keeps finding himself drawn to the sleek, dark hounds. They haven’t managed to come to enough of a compromise to actually arrange to visit anybody yet.

“It won’t be her,” Katya had told him in bed a few nights ago, bony chin grinding against the meat of Trixie’s shoulder to peer at the screen of the iPad, at the sweet black Saluki he couldn’t scroll past. “We can’t get Dolly, honey.”

He knows that, but he’d still gotten hot with embarrassment and rolled over, hidden his face against the pillows. He’d made Katya really work for it, made him be sweet and gentle and kiss Trixie’s shoulder and the back of his neck before he’d rolled back over and let Katya blow him.

“I’m already keeping Katya alive, aren’t I?” Trixie says now.

Bob huffs a laugh, says, “Yeah, and isn’t rabies catching? Poor thing won’t last a week.” Trixie prickles with stupid protectiveness, but Bob is still looking at the adoption website and he misses it, misses the flare of indignation that lights Trixie up, full Human Torch. “Where is Down Dog, anyway?”

“She’s out.” Trixie pops open his seltzer and takes a swig, feels the pleasant burn at the backs of his eyeballs and in his nose. “I don’t know where she goes. Probably dancing in circles around a pyre or some shit. Probably found a coven to slaughter babies with.”

“Shouldn’t you have a news channel on? Just in case.”

Trixie hadn’t wanted to tell anybody what happened. There were parts of it he didn’t really even want to tell Katya, parts that were just for him and Beatrice. He didn’t feel like setting up a bunch of tables in his front yard and letting everybody rifle through all of his shit. It didn’t really work out so great for him. The cryptkeeper he’s chosen to love is literally incapable of keeping his mouth shut.

When Trixie got home from filming his season he had refused to tell Katya a single thing that had happened, because he wasn’t trying to get sued for breaking his NDA and he knew every bitch in a five mile radius would hear about it immediately. Even when Katya had begged, even when Katya had made _him_ beg, he hadn’t given in.

They’d been home from their gig in Vernalis for about fifteen seconds before Katya had called Bob and told him absolutely everything. He’d been animated and exuberant, pacing around the apartment and yelling into the phone. Trixie had been unpacking and, like, processing the paradigm shift in his understanding of the universe. He’d only gotten snippets of the conversation, whenever Katya had looped back through the bedroom and paused to widen his eyes at Trixie in astonishment. Bob had hung up on Katya repeatedly, until Katya had eventually insisted that he just come over, so they could show him.

The magic had been enough, by the way. Bob took it about as calmly as anybody could, way more calmly than either of them. He’d remained perfectly still on the couch as Katya had struggled to conjure something, sweating with the effort of it. Trixie really hadn’t thought it was necessary to tell Bob that not only is there a universe where they’re actually women, but that the two of them fucked in that universe. Or that they dated, which was somehow more humiliating. Katya’d been giddy with the shared secret and hadn’t been able to help herself, little sparks jumping from her palms and shimmering around the room as she talked.

“She’s fine, Bob,” Trixie says.

It’s so hot today that opening a window feels like opening the oven, a whole-face blast that makes your eyes prickle and water. Bob’s been here in the AC for like fifteen minutes and he still has a sheen of sweat above his top lip and in the hollow of his throat. Trixie worries about Katya walking around out there, definitely not wearing enough sunscreen or sticking to the shade.

“Is she?” Bob says. Trixie values the way Bob won’t let him just have anything, the way he always provokes Trixie into really examining his stance, but today it rankles him. Today he’d kinda like to smack him. “Because last time I was here she almost burned the house down.”

Brian’s magic isn’t like Katya’s, or her aunts’. He’s not a healer, not an empath, not clairvoyant. He doesn’t control the weather, or read minds. It explodes out of him at inopportune moments: on stage, while they’re fucking, when he does yoga. He’s energised by the movement of his body, so when Bob had been here last week and Katya had been putting on an impromptu show in one of her newer wigs, really feeling her fantasy, it hadn’t been exactly surprising that every candle in the whole house had burst alight all at once. Trixie had done a quick perimeter sweep to make sure nothing was actually damaged, feeling the whole time like he was suddenly responsible for an exceptionally volatile toddler.

“I know,” Trixie says, and he can’t help the way his eyes find the scorch marks on the kitchen cabinets. “She’s getting better. She’s learning to control it.”

Bob doesn’t say anything until Trixie looks at him, and when he does he has this pitying expression that makes Trixie furious. He says, “Okay, girl,” and then he shifts a little closer to Trixie, slides a hand across the countertop until his fingers are almost touching the skin at the inside of Trixie’s wrist. “Hey, while she’s out, do you wanna. . .”

“No!” Trixie screeches, up off the barstool like he just bottomed for the first time, scrabbling to put space between them. Bob cracks up and approaches again, and Trixie balances on his toes to maintain their distance while he says, “Oh my _god_. Get away from me. Not in this universe, mama. Not if we were the only two people left in this universe.”

Bob is cackling himself out of his skin, but he stops advancing and says, “Alright, God. Is other Trixie this loud?”

“No.” Trixie deflates immediately. They talked a lot about Katya, about the magic, about how eerie it was to see her and Brian together, full _The Shining_ realness. No one’s really asked him about Beatrice. Trixie goes for the couch and folds himself into the corner of it, grateful that Bob stays right where he is, lets him be precious about his space. “No,” Trixie says again. “She’s. . . she wasn’t really like me at all. She’s like, calm? I don’t know, girl. Everybody else was panicking and she just knew what to do. And she was brave.”

“Trixie,” Bob says, and it’s the gentlest he’s ever heard him sound, so fucking _kind_ that Trixie’s shy about it. “That’s you, mama. You know it’s gonna give me an ulcer so, like, don’t expect to ever hear this from me again. But you’re calm. You’re brave. You know what to do.”

Trixie’s ears get hot and it feels like he’s sending out a homing signal to all the other criminally tender fags in the area. He scrunches his face up, hides behind his hands, says, “Oh my God,” and lets the Midwest twang inside of the vowels ring out through the room like a guitar sting. “She’s different. We had to work for it.”

“Well, _yeah_.” Bob laughs. He does come away from the island then, comes right around to sit at the other end of the couch from Trixie, the can of seltzer still in his fist. “Of course you did. You make everyone work for it. You are the brattiest fucking bottom I’ve ever met in my life.” Trixie opens his mouth to list twenty of their colleagues he’d award that prestigious title ahead of himself, but Bob is still going. “Obviously when there was two of you it was twice as hard to let your guard down.”

“I hate painting, now,” Trixie admits quietly. “It feels like I’m betraying her. Like, this is what I think a woman is? That’s clown shit, mama.”

Bob crunches the seltzer can down into a disk in one hand and stares Trixie down. “Since when has your goal been to look like a woman? I thought you’ve been paying homage to your real dad, John Wayne Gacy, this whole time.”

Trixie screeches and throws his head back so violently his baseball cap falls off. God, it is a true fucking miracle his wig ever stays put. “Shut up, you fucking bitch,” he says, and scrabbles blindly around on the floor for his hat. “You know what I mean, though? Katya — other Katya — she’s here every time Brian is in face. Even when he _isn’t_. She’s inside him.”

“Right, but it’s not like you don’t have room for a whole person inside _you_.” Bob grins, thrilled with himself. “Trixie, you don’t have to be exactly the same as her. You’re not the same. I know Twitter is getting to you but you’re not a dyke, mama. You _are_ a cunt, but you don’t have one.”

Trixie throws the television remote at Bob, in retaliation and so he can stew over that for a while. When they’d sat circled around the table, the four of them, and traded the details of their lives like sharing secrets, he’d been too embarrassed to even meet Beatrice’s eyes. Hers had been caught on the Polaroid mostly, drifting around the room but alighting on it again and again. They still have it, she and Katya; Brian had insisted they keep it as a little memento, even if it did mean they might warp the space-time continuum.

He doesn’t have to be like Beatrice. He _isn’t_ like her, not in the way that Katya and Brian are. He has enough of her to be right for Brian, to be as unwavering and patient and kind as she is, but he doesn’t have to do it exactly the way that she does. They’re different, and it’s okay.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> you can find me on [twitter](https://twitter.com/reallybeanie) and [tumblr](https://katiehoughton.tumblr.com/) if you want to chat. i'd love to know what you thought about this chapter ♡


	3. fuckin' euphoria

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> thank you all so much for sticking with me so far. i know this one has an outrageously high buy-in, and i'm very grateful. the absurdly talented hhh-heck over on tumblr drew [this artwork](https://hhh-heck.tumblr.com/post/630154335930728448/) for the last chapter, and i am astonished and moved and overjoyed by it. 
> 
> this one is for [stutter](https://archiveofourown.org/users/stutter/profile), as is most of what i do. i love you, thank you for loving me back. i'm so glad you're my soulmate for the time being.

Trixie is allowing himself the rare indulgence of spending the morning lazing in bed. Katya’s here, at home, so when Trixie first woke up he rolled over onto his stomach and went right back to sleep, emerged bleary-eyed and disoriented into the day an hour or so later. He hasn’t moved yet. He can hear Katya in the shower, warbling atonally along to the song playing from his phone speakers. Trixie wriggles around in the bed, seeking a cool spot to lie in so he can thermoregulate like a lizard. He dozes, allows himself to drift, and is jerked violently awake again by Katya calling for him.

“Oh, my God,” Trixie mutters to himself. He supports his body on bent elbows and the sheets slip down to his waist, exposing his torso. It’s softer than he’d like, but he’s tan already just a handful of weeks into the summer and his broad shoulders do a lot of the work for him. He’s not a fitness gay and he never will be, no matter how many times Brian drags him along to his workouts, but he feels good in his skin.

“Tracy! _Tracy!_ ” Katya’s voice has reached a level of shrill that Trixie finds acceptable only when it’s coming out of his own mouth. He heaves his legs out of the bed like they aren’t attached to him and pauses there to reconsider all of his life choices up to this moment.

“ _What?_ ”

“Come here please immediately, Tracy, I love you so much, please come here.” Trixie grumbles the whole way to the bathroom and props himself up in the doorframe. Katya has cleaned off some of the condensation in the mirror with his hand and he meets Trixie’s eyes in that smeary clear patch, says, “Look! Oh my God.”

“Oh,” Trixie says flatly. “That’s cute.” Katya is wearing a white-blonde unit that tumbles in sleek waves down to her hips, Godiva realness. It’s not her usual style at all. He can’t imagine how she’s going to do a cartwheel in it. “I didn’t know shiny, healthy-looking hair was your vibe. Won’t you need to tow it behind a fourteen wheeler and hack at it with some gardening shears before it’s wearable?”

Katya makes a whiny, discontented noise that’s humbling to hear only because he recognises himself in it, hears himself rocking back against two of her fingers and pleading. She says, “No. Come here,” and flaps a hand vaguely towards herself. She’s wearing only briefs and he lets himself step in close and feel her hot against his own bare thigh. Katya takes Trixie’s hand in hers and wraps some of the hair around his fingers, waits for him to get the hint. It takes him a second, his brain crunches unpleasantly, but eventually he grabs hold of a chunk of her hair and yanks. Katya yelps, the skin at her scalp puckers, and she says, “It’s growing. It’s _growing_.”

“What’d you do, you bald bitch?” Trixie shrieks at her. He tugs on her hair again, forgetting that if it’s growing right out of her head then that’s going to kinda suck. She huffs and swats him away, sweeps the whole thick rope of it over her opposite shoulder, out of his reach. Trixie feels the edges of his mind warping unpleasantly again and he squeezes his eyes closed for a moment, says, “There a hair growth spell you didn’t share with me?”

Katya doesn’t answer right away and Trixie opens his eyes again. She’s looking at herself in the mirror, sifting her fingers slowly through the ends of the hair, _her hair_. “No, it’s. . . I did- I tried-” Trixie chews on his tongue. He’s been working on not interrupting. Eventually, Katya turns away from her reflection and says to him, “I wanted to do a summoning spell. I wanted to bring her here.”

“Are you dumb?” Trixie blurts. Katya’s face collapses and Trixie steps in closer, brushes the backs of his fingers against Katya’s cheek in apology, tempers his voice to say, “She couldn’t even get that one right, and she’d been practicing magic her whole life, girl. You really thought that would work?”

“I thought it was worth a shot.” Katya shrugs. She’s still playing with the ends of her hair, sifting her fingers through it. It’s longer than the other Katya’s was, Beatrice’s too, longer than any wig Trixie has ever seen her in before, anything he’s ever worn himself. “I showered like normal, and then when I got out I- it was-” She flaps her hands around her own head like she’s trying to bat away a particularly tenacious insect.

Trixie rotates his body to lean against the edge of the countertop and look at her. The loose wave of the hair softens her severe bone structure, narrows her jaw. Her lashes are dark and clinging together from the shower, her skin smooth and a little pink from a fresh shave. It could be her, Katya, standing here in their bathroom, flung out of time again.

“Wow.” Trixie exhales a slow, measured breath. He feels shy the way he did when they were all four crammed around that little table in Verbena and he had a steaming, fragrant scone in his hands. “This is. . . your magic’s really getting stronger, huh? You been drinking the blood of virgins or what?”

“I’m not a vampire, Tracy.” She’s making a really valiant effort to look at him but her eyes keep drifting back to her own reflection over and over and she’s preening like a cockatiel. Like she’s going to peck herself to death. “And you’re a lot of things, you are.” Her eyes cut sideways to him again for just a second. “I have so many superlatives I could award you, honey, really. But if you think you’re a virgin. . .” She trails off and one corner of her mouth twitches, galvanized with mischief.

Trixie squawks and reaches out as if to sock her in the bicep, but his fist hangs, petrified, in mid-air. He can’t bring himself to smack her through all that hair, not when she’s blinking her intelligent, cervine eyes at him. “You think I’d let you drink my blood?” he says instead. “Even one time? I am not the one, girl. Why don’t you open up another drive-in juice bar in your own forearm, you psycho goth from hell.”

She’s grinning, thrilled with him, and she captures him against the counter with a hand either side of his hips. Bracketed by her arms like this, inside the cage of her, all of his chivalry goes right out of the window. He chases her down, kisses her, lets her lick into his morning mouth.

“Tracy,” she says sweetly. “ _Tracy_ ,” she says, full fucking Candyman. “Look at all this hair. You gotta fuck me, baby. C’mon. I know you wanna. I know this is just your type, huh? I can braid it, if you like.”

“Shut _up_ ,” he says, and he can’t quite manage to squawk it at her. It isn’t funny to him, not the way it is to Katya. She gets this wicked look on her face sometimes and asks him if he still loves her even though she can’t be what Beatrice is, asks if he wishes she had a pussy he could eat. It wasn’t like that, it didn’t feel like that in the bed with Beatrice, and he hates Katya a little every time she brings it up. Each time it comes into the light the finish on that gleaming memory gets brassier, more dull. He says, “Don’t joke about that, Brian. It’s not funny.”

Katya doesn’t seem to notice the way Trixie has shrunk away from her, collapsed inwards. She steps back from him and lifts her hands between their bodies to show him. Her fingers are all crooked and unnaturally bent, and she says, “Oh, _ow_.”

One of the cabinet drawers flies open and slams into the small of Trixie’s back, and Katya stumbles absently through an apology. She’s straightening each of her fingers one at a time and flexing them slowly. Trixie gets a sudden flash of what their life will look like in forty years, fifty. It makes him cold all over like someone just did a fucking jazz square over his grave.

Behind him, the faucet starts streaming with flowers. They’re exploding out of it, roses and tulips, sweet peas, daisies, carnations, poppies, and kinds Trixie can’t name, kinds he doesn’t know he’s ever seen before. Or perhaps he has, just that once, in the witch’s garden. The fat heads of a hundred different kinds of flower and all of the accompanying greenery is too much for the drain to handle. They start spilling over from the bowl of the sink and covering the countertop and the floor. The bathroom smells alive, abundant, green.

“I’m glad that this is, like, fun for you,” Trixie says carefully. “But it really fucking sucks for me, actually.”

Brian lets out a short, dry bark of laughter and curls her fingers experimentally into a fist. “Oh, this seems fun?” She flexes her hands again and it’s smoother this time, easier, less terribly arthritic. “This seems like a good time to you?” She closes her eyes and mutters something more curse than incantation, and the stream from the faucet stops.

“Don’t do that,” Trixie says. “You’re having the time of your life.” He says it just to be unkind, but it isn’t untrue. Katya has been on the ceiling since they came home. Sometimes floating. Sometimes crawling. Either way, he’s looking up at her. “I didn’t get anything out of it. You got to come back with fucking magic powers, girl. And you get to have a part of her with you always. I just. . . I learned that I’m failing every version of myself, everywhere. The me in every other universe is stronger than I am.”

He has all of his fingertips pressed against his browbone. Not for the first time, he wishes he had real eyebrows. It feels like he’s trying to sculpt an expression with his hands, like his face is built from polymer clay. Katya’s watching him carefully, her own stupid little half-brows turned up and out like apostrophes.

“Trixie. I’m exhausted all the time.” She puts one foot on the pedal of the trash can to hold it open and stretches across the entire length of the counter to start scooping handfuls of flowers out of the basin to throw them away. Already, the ones at the very bottom of the sink are rotten and mulchy, turning to brown sludge in Katya’s hands. She angles her head violently to one side to get her hair out of her eyes, says, “I’m in pain _all the time_.”

Trixie huffs, says, “We’re drag queens.”

“It’s not the same thing, honey. You know that.”

She finishes clearing out the bowl of the sink and goes to her knees to start picking up the foliage from the floor as well. Her hair is so long that it’s getting tangled with petals and leaves but it just makes her look like a Waterhouse, a Millais, a Cabanel.

“Am I supposed to feel sorry for you?” Trixie says.

Katya’s head snaps up to look at him. In the bedroom, the bulb in each light fixture shatters with a pop Trixie feels like pressure in his sinuses. Shards of glass explode outwards and fall to the ground in slow-motion, fluttering lazily down like snowfall. Katya’s stupid long nails are scrabbling against the tile, unable to find purchase and pick up some of the wettest leaves, the ones that have gotten glued to the floor. Trixie kneels down with her and scrapes up the last of the detritus with his blunt boy nails. Already the lush, verdant smell has gotten sweeter, less garden and more carrion. He can’t be certain that he’s hallucinating the scuttling of many-legged, necrophagic insects around the perimeter of their bathroom.

“I didn’t ask for your pity, honey.” Katya’s sitting back on her heels now. She’s in just her underwear, they both are, but he keeps forgetting because of the slippery blonde spill of her hair all across her shoulders and down her back.

The little trash can has gotten full and Katya wrestles the liner out of it and ties it closed. It’s bulging as she takes it out like there’s something alive inside of there, like when Brian’s sister-in-law was pregnant and they’d have to make nice, offer polite smiles when she showed them an elbow or a foot pressing against her stomach from the inside, trying to get out. As she holds it, it shrinks in her hands, shrivelling and growing dark with rot like produce forgotten at the back of the refrigerator. For a moment it buzzes with flies, loud like static, and then it finally falls still and silent.

Katya looks up at him and says, “Do you have any idea- you can’t imagine what this is like for me. The fuckin’ euphoria every time I get a spell to work right. Being wildly out of control of my body. It doesn’t feel safe. It doesn’t feel good. This is not good for me, Trixie.”

He feels vaguely, peripherally nauseated, guilt and fear churning in the pit of his stomach. They’re both still on their knees, and Katya looks smaller than he’s seen her in weeks. He mourns the passing of his indignation, thanks it for what it taught him, and he says, “I didn’t think about it that way.”

“Yeah.” Katya lifts one shoulder, an almost-shrug. “I’m trying not to think about it that way, either. And it’s- you’re right, you know? It _is_ fun. It makes complete sense with my fantasy. I was, you know, _ya splyu_.” Katya gestures ephemerally about herself. “My whole life. And now I’m awake.” Her eyes get very wide as if to illustrate her point. He loves her so much it feels like a wound.

Trixie knee-walks the couple of feet between them until he can pluck Katya’s hand from her lap and cradle it between both of his, trap it there, trace the lines of her delicate fingers and the crest of each knuckle. “I want to be what you need. The way Beatrice is what Katya needs.”

“Baby,” she says. Her hair is getting longer; he hadn’t noticed, but it’s pooling around them now, growing around them, encasing them in an intimate, amniotic bubble on the bathroom floor. Katya reaches up, brushes her own hair out of Trixie’s face. “You _are_. And you’re right. I do feel her in here.” She taps a couple fingers against her own breastbone. “But I also- it feels sometimes like she’s trying to get _out_ , honey, you know what I mean? We’re not them. Neither of us.”

They have both surrendered their anger to the earth between them. Trixie lets her angle his face toward hers, lets her kiss him. He slides his hands into her hair, feeling clumsy and awkward on the ground the way they are but feeling too good, too relieved to stop. He lets her sling one bare leg over his so that she’s almost straddling him, she’s leaning down over him, and he hums a pleased little noise into her mouth when he feels her dick against his thigh.

Eventually, they break apart, and Trixie says, “Stay right here. Let me go take care of all that glass.”

“You’re not wearing any shoes either!” Katya calls after him.

“Mama, you’ve seen my feet. These bunions? I got shoes built in.”

He really did think it would be fine but it sure isn’t, and he winces his way through their bedroom on the balls of his feet, trying to step lightly and feeling like an oaf. In the hall he stuffs his bare feet awkwardly into the first pair of sneakers he finds. He gets the broom and the dustpan, gets to work sweeping every inch of the bedroom floor. He can hear Katya in the bathroom, spraying cleaning fluid onto the tile and into the sink, scrubbing the last of the mulch away.

When Trixie’s done as much as he can, stretched as far beneath the bed and the dresser as he’s able to with the broom, he sits on the edge of the bed and gets clumsily out of his shoes again. His feet are raw, shredded, and he pulls them into his lap one at a time to inspect them. There are a few slivers of glass he can’t get out with his fingers. “Katya, can you grab the tweezers for me?” he calls out.

She clicks her tongue when she comes back into the bedroom and sees the state he’s in. Her hair is down to her knees now and there are a few petals still tangled in it. Katya settles cross-legged on the floor at Trixie’s feet, but before she comes near him she turns her palms up into padmasana and begins an invocation. It’s closer to song than her spells usually sound. The shards Trixie missed from all of the crevices and tight spots in their room come through the air towards Katya like they’re caught in a tractor beam. They come hurtling, wobbling, but they alight in her palms as harmless as sugar glass. They both watch, their twin breaths noisy in the awed room, as the rest of the glass lifts itself out of the dustpan and comes to arrange itself neatly in her palms back into two perfect bulbs.

Katya lets out a yell of laughter and looks up at Trixie, open-mouthed in wonder. “I surely can’t do the incandescent part,” she tells him earnestly. “I am not an electrician. But pretty neat, huh?”

“ _Yeah_.” It feels stupid to say.

She takes his feet into her hands then, one at a time, and she coos, “Oh, Tracy.” He’s a little worried she’s going to rub some disgusting concoction onto them but she doesn’t. She makes this sweet, chirruping noise and strokes her long fingers over the soles of his feet in deliberate, sweeping motions. His hips buck when she digs her thumbs into the meat right under his big toes, both at the same time, and he lets out a surprised little grunt. His feet don’t hurt anymore. He can’t feel it at all.

“All better?” She tilts her head. He nods, mute with relief, and Katya gets to her feet like she’s liquid, fluid and graceful. Her hair skims the floor now, flutters around her ankles. She rotates her hips in a lazy figure-eight, gathers up some of her hair and raises her arms above her head to let it all come cascading down again. “Baby? Are we all better? You have to fuck me with this hair, Trixie, please.”

“You’re disgusting,” he tells her sincerely. “You’re rotted,” he says, and reaches for her as she slides up onto the bed. He lets her push him down until he’s flat on the mattress and she’s over him, above him, the fucking hair spilling all around and getting in both their mouths.

The way she kisses is different when she’s like this. She’s sweet, a little silly, making him work to chase her. He does, gladly. The blinds are still closed in their bedroom and every shadow is drawn out long like it’s late afternoon. Trixie opens his mouth against hers, lets her suck on his tongue like they’re teenagers drunk on getting away with it, like they’re not going to last five minutes. He slides both hands all the way up her back and into her hair right at the base of her skull, and then he grabs two fistfuls and pulls. It’s hard enough that she breaks out of their kiss to stare down at him, panting like she’s already ruined.

“Hi,” Trixie says. “You’re so pretty.”

She preens, delicate colour rising in her cheeks and along her throat. Her knees are either side of his hips and she’s grinding against him slowly, as if she doesn’t even realise she’s doing it. “And you’re _so gay_ ,” she says, and leans back down to kiss him again. She has one arm around his head, cradling him, and he can feel her hard against his stomach. They kiss like they have all the time in the world, like nothing can touch them, like nothing comes next. Trixie slides his hands up the backs of her thighs and tucks his fingertips just inside the cotton of her briefs. Her skin is so soft right here and so hot, and she makes this soft, pleased noise.

“I want you to fuck me a little bit,” Katya pulls back to tell him. She keeps having to shove the hair out of her eyes with the heels of her palms and lift up to yank it out from under her knees by the handful.

“Yeah?”

“Yeah.” Her smile widens, gets a brilliant spangle of light at one corner like in a cartoon. “I just keep thinking if I can’t have you I’m going to die.” Trixie’s face gets flushed and he turns his head but she’s right there, peering down at him, stealing quick little kisses from him still. “Tracy, you’re so sexy. Will you please?”

He makes a show of groaning, makes a string of long-suffering noises under his breath, but he rolls her off of him until she’s on her hands and knees in the middle of the mattress. Her hair is a lake around them and she’s buoyant, elated when she peers back over her shoulder to see him. He peels her underwear down and untangles them from her one foot at a time, tosses them away somewhere behind himself. Trixie leans in and licks her slowly, making a real show of it. She’s quivering instantly, rocking back against his mouth and moaning like she’s already mindless with it. He gets one hand around the base of her dick and squeezes in warning, strokes just a tiny bit. Katya goes down to her forearms and hides her face against the sheets, but he can still hear her panting, still feel how frantic she is for him, how desperate, when he grips her thigh.

He reaches blindly behind himself, bats his hand around until he finds the drawer pull on the nightstand and can yank it open. Katya twitches when he snaps open the lube bottle, whines when he coats a few fingers and the plasticky smell of it fills their bedroom. “Alright?” he asks her, but he knows the answer and he’s pushing his index finger into her before she can even say _yes, yeah_. She reacts like it’s a cattle prod, jerks violently and bites out a low groan that he feels travel all the way through her from the pit of her stomach. It’s for show mostly, for him; he knows it really doesn’t feel like much until he gives her two or three fingers.

“God, Trixie,” she’s saying. Her voice is muffled against the mattress and also, somehow, right in his ear, so close he can feel her warm breaths. “You’re so good, honey.”

He takes his other hand off her dick then and grabs a fistful of her hair, yanks until her spine bows and he can suck at the underside of her jaw. He adds another finger and she cries out, shivers, clenches around him. “Tell me.”

“I only ever wanna do this with you,” she gasps. “Gonna marry you, huh? Gonna be your wife. All docile and subservient, just like you like.” Katya is tugging on her own cock now. Trixie lets go of her hair and she collapses back onto the sheets, half propped up on one arm. He presses himself against the curve of her ass to let her feel how hard he is, how he’s straining against his briefs, making a damp patch in the front of them.

He fucks into her a little harder and gets to see it travel through her body, the way every thrust shunts her further up the bed. Trixie says, “Literally what the fuck are you talking about. What about me makes you think I want subservience? I don’t want a good little wife, Katya. I just want you.”

“Okay,” she gasps. “Okay, okay, oh my God, honey. You gotta stop. That’s good. That’s- Jesus _Christ_.” He pulls his fingers out of her and lets her roll over. Some of her hair gets caught beneath her when she does and she winces, blinks back watery eyes as she adjusts. She says, “I want to fuck you. I gotta fuck you.”

“God, okay, fine.” Trixie rolls his eyes, but he’s betrayed by the damp patch at the front of his underwear, the red flush crawling across his chest, the way he has to take a slow, shuddering breath right after.

He preps himself with the same fingers he just had inside of Katya, hurrying through it, not quite looking at her. She’s watching him, one arm folded beneath her head and her other hand around her cock, stroking herself slowly. When he’s done he passes her the lube, throws it at her, and lets her slick herself for him. She’s whining again, petulant and bratty, petting absently at her own hair with her free, non-lubey hand. Trixie slides his knee across her thighs and sinks down over her, takes her inside as slowly as he can bear, his mouth falling open. It’s so good every time, still.

“Oh, my god, _Katya_.”

“Yeah, honey. I know.”

He collapses over her, hides his face against her neck where she smells the most like herself. She fucks him like she kind of hates him a little. He clings to her biceps, curls his toes, spits her fucking hair out of his mouth. He’s already most of the way there just from eating her ass and listening to her moan. When he lifts up to tell her that, panic clutches him and he says, frantic, “Katya, I can’t see. _Katya_!”

“I know, baby.” His vision is completely white, snowblind. He turns his head towards where he knows the window to be and the light stays exactly the same. “I know,” Katya says again. “I can’t either. It’s okay. We’re okay.”

She moves as if to pull out of him and he clenches hard around her, gasps, “Please stay inside me.”

“Okay, honey. Alright. I got you.” She resumes her thrusts, fucking into him so hard he feels drunk with it, stupid. The room fills with a terrible roaring like a storm, the kind of storm he hasn’t seen since he left the Midwest. Katya says, “Hey, Trixie, close your eyes.”

He does, allows his world to fold inwards until it’s just them, just Katya inside him and her tiny, tight breaths against the side of his face. When she comes, the bed lifts a couple inches off of the ground and then slams back down just slightly askew. She starts stroking Trixie, still fucking into him, and he comes with a little yell. His vision is back; it’s dark like normal behind his closed eyes now, instead of that brilliant, clinical white. When he opens them again he expects to see a hole in the wall. There’s nothing, just Katya smiling serenely, blissfully up at him, her stomach slippery with his come.

“Oh, hello, hi,” she says, and he laughs because he doesn’t know what else to do.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> i'm on [twitter](https://twitter.com/reallybeanie) and [tumblr](https://katiehoughton.tumblr.com/) if you'd like to chat! i would really, really love to hear what you thought of this one ♡


	4. sometimes it’s pretty cool

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> i could have never pulled this off without the support and guidance of the polycule. thank you all for being there at all hours, very gently herding my brain cells in the right direction. i'm so, so grateful.
> 
> this story is the seventh gift for [stutter](https://archiveofourown.org/users/stutter) that i've posted on this site. writing something for her, working on something that i think she'll like, pushes me to do better and be braver. she is exactly that way as a person, too. i feel so lucky every day that i get to spend with her. i love you and i like you, baby.

For a woman who shaves her own head once a week or so, Katya makes a real production out of it this time. In fairness, she’s usually just buzzing away the prickly blonde regrowth of stubble. She doesn’t usually have to braid it first because her hair is longer now than she is tall like this is fucking _Tangled_. Katya asks Trixie to be the one to do it, ostensibly because he has a certificate in cosmetology from the Aveda Institute of Beauty and Wellness Milwaukee squirrelled away in a drawer somewhere, thank you so much. He’s pretty sure it doesn’t take a qualification from beauty school to shave someone’s head, pretty sure it’s because Katya is feeling her oats too hard and she can’t possibly bring herself to actually do it.

“Girl, unless you want me to mess up your regular ear too I’m gonna need you to say still,” Trixie says. He’s got her on a chair in the middle of the living room and she’s wriggling around, keeps craning her neck back and pouting until he leans over to kiss her. He says, “Think, you know, corpse.”

“Oh, honey, I am always thinking corpse,” Katya grins, and folds her arms neatly across her chest ready to be laid down for her eternal sleep. “Will you still think I’m pretty when I start to calcify, Tracy? When all the flesh rots off my bones.”

He snorts and comes at her with the scissors, snips right next to her ear to startle her. “I think we’re way past that, wouldn’t you say?” Trixie hums and tucks the scissors into the back pocket of his jeans, lets his hands settle at Katya’s shoulders. “Hey, do you want, like. . . I can give you the full fantasy?”

“I really don’t think we have time for you to get into face, honey, do you?”

He shrieks and swats at her, gets his fingers around her throat but doesn’t squeeze. “That is not what I meant. You know I learned to do, like, the whole massage thing. At school.”

“Trixie,” she says, letting him down easy. “I’m a witch, honey. I can just magic away all of that tension. And yours too, if you want.”

“Right,” he says, feeling bashful, feeling foolish. “Yeah. Okay. Are you ready, then?” Katya nods mutely, blinking up at him. Trixie moves around to stand behind her again and takes one of the long blonde braids in his hand. He can’t help but think about her, Beatrice. He wonders whether she still wears her hair just like this, or whether she’s changed it up now that she’s in her fifties. Trixie shakes his head to drag himself out of that and takes the scissors out of his back pocket, takes a deep breath. Katya screeches when he makes the first cut and he jumps out of his skin, says, “ _Brian!_ ”

“Sorry, sorry,” she wheezes at him, through emphysemic puffs of laughter. “I’m sorry. God, you are _cute_. Sorry.”

She behaves herself the rest of the time, sitting perfectly still with her hands trapped between her thighs. It doesn’t mean that she’s quiet; she chatters away, telling him all about the research she’s been doing, looking for her ancestors who might’ve been witches, too. Trixie is interested, he really is, but when he winds up holding a thick blonde braid in each hand his throat gets tight and he swallows roughly.

“Don’t you think it’s so interesting that it’s matrilineal?” Katya is saying. “Usually, I mean. But I’m a boy- a man-”

“You’re a fag,” Trixie supplies helpfully.

“Right, right. But I wonder, like, if I had a kid.”

Trixie’s whole body prickles immediately and he comes around from behind the chair to see Katya’s face. He’s still holding the scissors, tight in his fist now, and he jabs them in her direction. “Do you want to have a kid?”

“No! Jesus Christ, oh my God. Absolutely not, Tallulah. No.” She shudders violently and scrunches her face up. Trixie relaxes his grip on the scissors. “I’m just saying. Do you think it’d be passed down?”

“I don’t know, girl. I think there are other things that’d get passed down, for sure.” Katya is reaching for him insistently, tugging on his belt loops, and he straddles her in the chair, rewards her with a quick kiss. “But, like, your mom isn’t a witch, is she?”

“No, she’s just from Boston.”

“I don’t think it works that way, you know? It’s not congenital.”

He sees the way Katya’s whole face tilts wickedly to one side before he feels her grope him hard through his jeans, and she says, “You’re so sexy when you talk about genitals.”

“Oh really that’s so funny because you’re literally disgusting,” he tells her, and kisses her open-mouthed. He likes feeling her lift up into him, the way she has to arch her neck, and he settles one hand against her jaw. It’s weird to feel the ends of her hair brush his knuckles, weird to be able to touch her hair if he wants to.

She must feel it too, because she breaks away from him to say, “Ooh! Hey, Tracy, what do you think?” She shakes her head and the ends of the rough bob Trixie has cut in swing around her jaw.

Trixie frowns. “I don’t know, mama. You’re telling me you have the patience to pin curl all that down under a wig cap every time you’re getting in drag? I don’t see that for you.”

“But do you think I’m pretty, though?”

She’s joking. He doesn’t know why it makes him want to cry. He chews on the inside of his lip, studies her for a long moment, and then says, “You’re beautiful, Katya.”

“Oh,” she says softly. He kisses her again, cradling her face in both hands this time, sweeping his thumbs over her cheeks. He doesn’t allow either of them to get distracted. Trixie breaks out of their kiss and gets out of Katya’s lap, ignoring the needy little whine she gives him so he can move around behind the chair. He asks her again if she’s ready before he starts with the clippers and she nods a few more times than seems necessary, like she’s forgotten how to stop. He has to grab hold of her head so she’ll quit moving and he can get started.

Trixie finds it meditative to shave a head, especially when it isn’t his own and he doesn’t have to crane his neck around trying to make sure he doesn’t miss any patches at the back. He likes the feeling of Katya’s warm, bald scalp under his careful fingers. It feels strangely like seeing him again after a long time away. When Trixie is done, Katya takes a moment to rub his own hands over his head like it’s the first time, like he wasn’t serving full Daddy Warbucks realness literally yesterday.

“You good?” Trixie asks, and offers the small kindness of staying right where he is behind the chair, not making Katya look at him.

It takes a moment, but then he twists around in his seat and says, “Yes, Tracy. I’m good. Thank you for helping me.”

“Someone’s got to,” Trixie shrugs. “And watching you struggle is like those fucking tragic ASPCA commercials. It’s either help you or euthanise you, you know?”

“Don’t talk about that unless you’re actually gonna do it. Don’t make false promises, Tallulah. It’s impolite.” Katya gets out of the chair and pursues Trixie across the living room and right out onto the balcony, shrieking.

They lean together against the railing and look down at the people in the street below. Katya’s got his fingers tucked into the waistband of Trixie’s shorts, just holding him there. There’s a woman with a baby in a stroller and she’s had to stop walking and tend to it because the rotten little thing is screaming, its red face all scrunched-up and furious. Katya leans out over the railing a little further and clasps his hands, bows his head to murmur something to them. When he opens them again there’s a butterfly balanced on the tip of his index finger. Its wings are vibrant pink and purple, black at the tips, and it bats them gently a few times.

“Go ahead,” Katya tells it. It cranes its head towards her, its antennae vibrating, and then it leaps from her hand and floats gently down until it lands right on the end of the baby’s nose in the street below. It stops crying immediately and its eyes cross to try to see the butterfly, its chubby arms waving gleefully and its little legs kicking. Katya turns to look at Trixie, newly-bald head gleaming in the afternoon sun, and he says, “Sometimes it’s pretty cool, you know?”

* * *

Trixie spent all morning shooting the promotional material for his upcoming tour and he feels irascible now. There’s a red line that runs all the way around his middle from the bottom of the corset and his feet ache from being in the shoes even though he spent most of the shoot sitting down. He left an empty apartment this morning and it feels even emptier to come home to. God, they really gotta get a dog. He needs someone to wag their tail and be excited to see him at the end of the day.

It makes him actually jump when his phone rings and he lets out a truly humiliating, deeply faggy scream. He could blame it on the fact that he’s in the middle of _Hereditary_ and Toni Collette is fully possessed, but it isn’t like there’s anybody here he needs to defend his honour to.

“Are you at home?” Katya blurts as soon as Trixie picks up, before he’s even gotten done saying _hey_.

Trixie mutes the movie and swivels around to recline on the couch with his feet propped on the armrest. He thinks Katya might be driving, from the background noise. He says, “Yes, I’m home. Why are we yelling?”

“Tracy!” Katya fucking screams into his ear. “Oh my God. Okay, just- I’ll be back in like a couple hours, honey. Please be home.”

She sounds so frantic that it’s making Trixie agitated too. He gets off the couch and paces a restless circuit through the living room and into the kitchen, says, “I’ll be here, girl. You want me to have food waiting?”

“Oh, my god, _yes_ ,” Katya gasps. “I am so in love with you, yes, please have food waiting.” He just hangs up then, and Trixie laughs out loud into the stillness of the apartment.

The movie doesn’t really hold his interest after that. He messes around on his phone replying to random comments on his Instagram posts, stalking his fans on Twitter and saving some of the memes they’ve made. It’s still weird to see accounts wearing his own face, people whose names are deliberate misspellings of his, people whose entire page is dedicated to him. He’s not mad about it — mama, it pays the bills — but it still feels kinda eerie to scroll through his mentions sometimes and see himself over and over again.

Trixie has a burrito waiting when Katya gets home. His own is desiccated because he couldn’t leave it alone, kept looping back around to pick at it with his fingers. When Katya comes through the door and sees Trixie and the food waiting his face gets bright. He throws his arms around Trixie’s neck and kisses him slowly, pulls back to say, “Good afternoon, good evening, hello, hi.”

“Hey, girl,” Trixie says, and steals a last, quick kiss. “You hungry?”

“ _Starving_.” Katya dumps all his stuff on the countertop, his backpack, his phone and wallet, and starts unwrapping his burrito. He’s giddy like a little kid, hopping around. Trixie plants both hands solidly at the tops of Katya’s shoulders and steers him backwards through the apartment, pushes him down into a chair at the dining table. Katya takes a huge bite and chews happily, his eyes fluttering closed.

Trixie feels nuts just standing watching Katya eat, but he doesn’t know what else to do with himself, exactly. He’s afraid to push, afraid to ask what’s going on in case Katya retreats, withdraws, refuses to tell him. He sits down, kitty-corner to Katya, and waits.

“Hey, so, okay,” Katya says earnestly, when he’s done devouring the burrito. He takes both of Trixie’s hands in his and gives them a little double squeeze. “You know how I’ve been, like, disappearing?”

Trixie scoffs and says, “Uh- _huh_. I had noticed.”

“Right, right.” Katya takes a big deep breath like he’s preparing to do something awful. Trixie clutches tighter at his hands. “I’ve been looking for anything she might’ve left me. I don’t know how, I just knew. I knew she’d try.”

Trixie works his tongue around inside his mouth, chews on that. He’s not sure what he expected, exactly; the things he said to Bob about Katya having found a coven were only half in jest. And since their fight last week, he’s wondered if Katya’s found some kind of meeting, a Necromancers Anonymous group he can attend. Which isn’t _not_ a coven. “You have?”

“I didn’t know if she’d know where we are.” Katya seems relieved that Trixie isn’t yelling or pulling away and the words start falling out of him more quickly, all crowding and jostling to get out of his mouth. “Where to come. I couldn’t go all the way up to Washington without you noticing, but I’ve been going as far north as I could.”

“You know, you wouldn’t have had to worry about me noticing if you’d just told me what you were doing.” Trixie’s shoulders sag and he peers into Katya’s solemn face. “Why didn’t you tell me what you were doing?”

They let go of one another’s hands, a mutual untangling that leaves Trixie feeling unmoored, devastated. He shoves them into the pockets of his sweatpants and lets his elbows jut out, creating a perimeter around his body. Katya takes his baseball cap off to scrub a palm over his bald head, and he says, “I didn’t want to be wrong. And I was afraid that if I told you about it, that made it true. And then I could be wrong.” He gives Trixie a moment to hear that, absorb it, and then he continues. “There’s this city off of Highway 99 called Merced. It’s like an hour south of Vernalis, Tracy, can you believe that?” Trixie makes a vague, affirming noise. “And I found it there.”

“What’d you find?”

“The book.”

Katya leaves Trixie sitting at the dining table and he goes to get his backpack from where he dumped it on the island. He heads for the living room with something in his hands and Trixie goes to meet him there. Whatever he’s holding seems the right size and shape to be one of Katya’s spellbooks, but Trixie can’t be sure. He can’t look directly at it. It’s like it’s actively repelling him; whenever he glances towards it, it shivers and mutates until he can’t understand what he’s seeing. As soon as he looks away, he forgets what he’s just seen, what he’s even been trying to see.

“Why is it like that?”

“Like what, honey?” Katya goes right to the ground and kneels in front of the coffee table, sets the book down on it.

Trixie has vertigo from trying to look at it, but he sits down too, right next to Katya. Now that he’s closer, the book is making a shrill, high noise, more vibration than sound. “I think this book hates me, Katya. I think it has an act of vengeance it wants to carry out.”

“Oh,” Katya says, and a smile blooms slowly across his face.

He disappears into the kitchen for a moment and Trixie closes his eyes because the book is making his stomach roil, making him feel nausea into his eyeballs. He hears cabinet doors opening and closing again. One entire cupboard is dedicated to Katya’s magic now, the shelves crowded with tinctures and bunches of dried herbs, things in jars that Trixie won’t inspect too closely in case they blink right back at him. Brian comes back with something in the palm of his hand and Trixie winces, says, “Please don’t get eye of newt on the rug.”

“It’s salt, to absorb negative energy” he says wryly. “But that’s very cute, Tracy.” He kneels down again and rubs the salt between his fingertips, sprinkles it onto the table in a circle around the book. He lays both of his palms flat on the book’s cover and gets a little crease between his eyebrows, mutters something low and unintelligible. Sweat beads along his upper lip, and then his eyes pop open and he says, “How’s that?”

Trixie looks down, and it’s just a book. Enormous, leatherbound, a little weary around the edges. It looks closer to four centuries old, now. “Holy shit, Katya!”

“Yeah,” he grins back at Trixie. “I think she did some kinda protection charm. She didn’t want anybody to find this except me, you know?”

The last remnants of Trixie’s piercing headache are easing, the cleaved-open edges of his skull knitting back together again. He shunts closer to Brian on the floor and finds himself holding his breath when he opens up the book. He has a strange sensation of déjà vu. Five minutes ago he couldn’t have described a single thing about it, couldn’t remember anything he’d seen peering over Brian’s shoulder at the witch’s table, but the tiny script is instantly familiar. Those little curls and scratches are just as dizzying as they had been then, make his brain feel just as fuzzy. He has to look away for a moment, to let everything right itself so he can think.

“This is her book. How- Brian. How can this be here?”

“I don’t know,” he whispers back. His voice is pink with the delight of a secret shared, and he’s absently tracing patterns across the yellowed pages while he looks intently at Trixie. “I don’t know, but she knew that there was more she had to teach me, and she made sure she could.”

The evening unspools around them, the shadows in the room lengthening as they pore over the book together. Katya has left notes on every single page, familiar handwriting crammed into the blank spaces of the margins and in between paragraphs. She’s drawn diagrams of her own, too, and she addresses Brian by name in places, as _moya vedmachik_ in others. Trixie opens his mouth to tease Brian for crying, and then realises that he is, too. Whenever a tear hits the book it beads and slides right off like it’s waterproof, but the pages don’t feel at all waxy. Whatever Katya did, she made sure that it would get to them safely.

“Oh, look! Look at this one.” Brian is laughing even as he swipes uselessly at his cheeks. “This one is, like, a poultice, kinda? For our feet after a show.” He makes a strangled noise and Trixie wraps an arm around his shoulders and hauls him in close, brings his other hand up to cradle Brian’s head against his chest. “She’s trying to take care of us from another dimension.”

“No,” Trixie says. Brian struggles in his grip and Trixie holds him tighter, can’t look at his face for this part. “She’s teaching _you_ how to take care of us. In this dimension”

“God,” Brian splutters, and Trixie lets him sit up again. He’s bashful, swiping roughly at his cheeks with the heels of his palms like a little kid.

These days it’s been even more difficult to find anything that holds Brian’s attention, but he doesn’t move, doesn’t fidget, hardly even seems to be breathing as he studies the spellbook. Trixie can’t understand most of it; even Katya’s notes are in the peculiar Russian-English patois she and Brian share. He feels agitated, but he doesn’t realise what it is that he’s hoping for until Brian turns a page and an entire sheath of papers falls out into Trixie’s lap.

“Oh,” he says quietly. The pages are looped together at one corner with a paperclip and Trixie mutters, “Just staple it, sis.”

It isn’t Katya’s writing, and it also isn’t like Trixie’s. The letters slant to the left more than his do and they’re cramped like she worried she would run out of room.

“What are those?” Brain chirps, leaning into Trixie’s space to see.

He has to squash the impulse to shy away, keep it for himself. Instead he unhooks the paper clip so they can fan out the pages across both of their laps. The top sheet has an indentation from being secured for god, what, two decades? Waiting for him.

“Are these recipes?” Brian says.

“This feels like a read.” Trixie’s voice comes out all wet and embarrassing and he ducks his chin to study all of it again.

Beatrice has done this for him. Page after page contain some of her favourite recipes, written out in small, careful steps like they’re going to be included in a book for children. He can hear her right there in his ear, fond and patronising. Each one comes with a little opener, a paragraph or two about the best time of year, the best circumstance in which to make it. There’s one for helping to restore Katya’s energy after she’s done a particularly taxing spell, one for courage and stamina beforehand. There’s a soup recipe for a head cold or a stomach flu. There’s a concoction that sounds revolting after a perfunctory skim of the ingredients list, but that Beatrice swears will keep Trixie’s voice healthy. She’s included the recipe for those incredible scones, and the dinner she had cooked for the four of them. Each one is explained simply, straightforwardly, so that he can’t possibly mess it up. She’s added her own little doodles, more self-conscious than Katya’s are.

He spends a long time poring over each one, tracing his fingertips over her writing to feel how it’s raised, how the paper has gotten fuzzy with age. He thinks about her at the kitchen table, thinking about _him_. Knowing he needs her just as much as Brian needs Katya. She writes exactly the way that she talks, acerbic, sarcastic, quietly affectionate.

The last page isn’t a recipe at all. It’s a letter, and Trixie does his best to slide it surreptitiously back beneath the pile to look at later, when he’s on his own. Brian has lost interest already and he’s turning the pages of the book again. Every once in a while the living room fills with the scent of an herb and Brian names them for him; nightshade, wormwood, belladonna, mandrake.

“Mm,” Trixie says, and sucks in a lungfull. “What’s that one?”

“I think that’s oregano, honey,” Brian says sweetly.

Trixie shrieks and lunges at him, kisses the smug slant right off his mouth. “Shut up, I hate you so much.”

“Mm-hmm, seems like you do,” Brian says into Trixie’s mouth. He’s too preoccupied to let Trixie distract him, and he goes right back to reading through the spellbook and muttering to himself.

Close to the end, there’s an envelope tucked inside the pages. Brian lets Trixie be the one to open it, even though he could probably just, like, magic it open or something. Trixie is careful not to rip the fragile paper. Inside, there’s a stack of photographs, the kind you have to get developed from a roll of film. Trixie says, “God, the early naughts were so gross,” and Brian screams a little laugh.

The photographs have a date printed in the corner of each one, so they can trace the progression of time. The ones at the bottom of the stack were taken just a few years ago; about ten years since Trixie and Brian had been there. In them, Dolly’s muzzle is shocked white and her whiskers are longer, more coarse. She’s laying on the couch with her head in Katya’s lap, whose hair is shorter but who looks otherwise identical.

“Oh cool,” Trixie says, “You’re just going to look exactly the same for the next few decades, huh? That’s fun for me.”

“I don’t think that counts as an achievement when I started out looking seventy five,” Brian says. He’s accepting each photograph after Trixie is done, to study it himself and then spread it out across the coffee table in a timeline. Their whole lives are there, the witch and the cook and the sweet, gentle dog. Brian swipes at his eyes again and says quietly, “We didn’t ruin them, Tracy. They’re okay.”

The last photograph in the whole pile makes Trixie scream and clutch it to his own chest, afraid to let Brian see. He can’t stop his stupid ricocheting bird-laugh long enough to explain, so eventually he gives in and shows it to Brian.

“That’s you!” he shrieks, and takes the picture from Trixie so he can look at it more closely. “She did your paint? Oh my God!”

“Yeah, with that one grainy Polaroid for reference.” Trixie feels a surge of protectiveness, over Beatrice and over the photograph, and he takes it back from Brian to study it again. “She actually- this isn’t so bad. Some of our colleagues have done worse attempts than this at my mug.”

Brian rests a hand at Trixie’s knee and says, “Well yeah, honey. It’s a part of her, right? I’m sure she just knew what to do.”

He is stunned by the thought of Beatrice doing this, Beatrice taking her time in front of the mirror and really studying the Polaroid, wanting to get it right. Beatrice, wanting to look like him, even if just for a short while. And then calling for Katya, letting her take a photograph for him, for Trixie. Maybe they took a few and this was the best of them, but he feels sure Beatrice wanted it to be over quickly, wouldn’t have let Katya play around with the composition of the shot, the lighting.

Trixie leaves Brian on the floor and retreats to their bedroom with Beatrice’s letter. He sits at the end of the bed and has to lay the paper out next to himself because his hands are trembling too badly to hold it. She’s self-conscious, almost shy, but she tells him about their lives. That she’s started playing guitar again and Katya is desperate to host some kind of open mic night at the apothecary, but Beatrice worries the people in the town won’t have patience for her slam poetry, her weird performance art. She tells him how freeing it’s been to know that they’ll win, to be sure that someday they’ll be able to get married for real. She tells him she hopes they’ve stopped being stupid now, him and Brian, that they’ve been courageous, instead. He reads and rereads it, so many times that Brian finds him sitting in the dark with an ache in his neck.

“What’d she say, honey?” he says gently.

Trixie swallows roughly, clears his throat, presses the heels of his palms into his eye sockets. “She said that, uh. . . she’s proud of me. And she’s glad that- that you have me, the way Katya has her. That she knows we’ll keep each other safe.”

“We’re gonna be fine, right?” Katya asks.

Trixie drops his hands so he can see him, Katya, standing there sweet and bald and faintly concerned. “I think so, yeah. I think we are.”

He knows what to do, now. He has Beatrice to show him.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> you can find me on [twitter](https://twitter.com/reallybeanie) and [tumblr](https://katiehoughton.tumblr.com/) if you'd like to chat. thank you for sticking with me on this one - i know it was a pretty big departure from what i usually post, and i'm so grateful. i'd really love to know what you thought ♡


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